Matter of Song in Early Modern England

Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English ''songscape'', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song ...